Hitler's own words refute the claim that he was a Christian of any kind...
Occasionally, when debating the Church's role in the Holocaust, someone will inevitably bring up Hitler's religious views. It is assumed that since he was baptized a Catholic, and attended Catholic school, and that he signed a Concordat with the Catholic Church, that he remained Catholic all his life.
The most irksome thing about this accusation, is that it is easily refutable if one takes the time to read a biography on Hitler. One can also read Hitler's own words on this subject in Table Talk, 1941-1944, edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1953; and reissued in 1973. It is a record of his conversations, which he agreed to on the suggestion of Martin Bormann. Luckily for historians, Hitler loved to give his opinions on a wide variety of matters, and so through his conversations we can get an accurate view of his thoughts. on religion.
Through this record of Hitler's conversations, we can see that Hitler was not Catholic in the least. Nor Christian in any way, shape, or form. He constantly attacks Christianity as a scourge of civilization, and repeatedly berates the Church for her lust of power and exploitation of the masses.
If there are people who doubt that Hitler was not a Christian, they should read these quotes below, taken from his conversations. These are only a small selection of passages which demonstrate his contempt for Christianity and the Church.
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.
Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilisation at a single stroke.
Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.
--Night of July 11-12, 1941, p. 7 in Table Talk.
Originally war was nothing but a struggle for pasture grounds. To-day war is nothing but a struggle for the riches of nature. By virtue of an inherent law, these riches belong to him who conquers them.
The great migrations set out from the East. With us begins the ebb, from West to East.
That's in accordance with the laws of nature. By means of the struggle, the elites are continually renewed.
The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest.
Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure."
--October 10, 1941, p.51
Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry. Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionaries, and items certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son a whore and a Roman soldier.
The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean's object was to liberate His country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's why the Jews liquidated Him.
Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely.When he learnt that Jesus's supporters let their throats be cut for His ideas, he realised that, by making intelligent use of the Galilean's teaching, it would be possible to overthrow this Roman State which the Jews hated. It's in this context that we must understand the famous "illumination". Think of it, the Romans were daring to confiscate the most sacred thing the Jews possessed, the gold piled up in their temples! At that time, as now, money was their god.
On the road to Damascus, St. Paul discovered that he could succeed in ruining the Roman State by causing the principle to triumph of the equality of all men before a single GodÙand by putting beyond the reach of the laws his private notions, which he alleged to be divinely inspired. If, into the bargain, one succeeded in imposing one man as the representative on earth of the only God, that man would possess boundless power.
--October 21, 1941, p. 76-77
But for the coming of Christianity, who knows how the history of Europe would have developed ? Rome would have conquered all Europe, and the onrush of the Huns would have been broken on the legions. It was Christianity that brought about the fall of RomeÙnot the Germans or the Huns.
--January 27, 1942, p. 253
I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie
--27 February, 1942 , p.343
Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.
--February 27, 1942 , p.343
Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation.
--December 13, 1941, p. 144
The fact that the Japanese have retained their political philosophy, which one of the essential reasons of their success, is due to having been saved in time from the views of Christianity. Just as in Islam, there is no kind of terrorism in the Japanese State religion, but on the contrary, a promise of happiness This terrorism in religion is the product, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalised and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men's minds.
--April 4, 1942, p393
[About the religiosity of the Finns]
It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament. For religious people who, in the solitude of winter, continually seek ultimate light on their religious problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually deformed. The wretched people strive to extract truths from these Jewish chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs.
It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German people should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbojumbo. So long as the wisdom, particularly of the Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result of studying the Bible. But since the Bible became common property, a whole heap of people have found opened to them lines of religious thought whichÙparticularly in conjunction with the German characteristic of persistent and somewhat melancholy meditationÙas often as not turned them into religious maniacs. When one recollects further that the Catholic Church has elevated to the status of Saints a whole number of madmen, one realists why movements such as that of the Flagellants came inevitably into existence in the Middle Ages in Germany.
As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by Jewish filth and priestly twaddle, that they were little different from the howling dervish of the Turks and the negroes, at whom we laugh so scornfully.
--June 5, 1942, p. 513
During the years of our struggle Rosenberg once submitted to me the draft of a leading article he proposed publishing in reply to the attacks of the Catholic Church. I forbade him to publish it; and I still think it was a great mistake that Rosenberg ever let himself be drawn into a battle of words with the Church. He had absolutely nothing to gain from it; the hesitant Catholics of their own free will regarded the Church with a critical eye, and from the truly devout not only could he expect no fair hearing for his "heretical outpourings", but he must also have realised that the opposition propaganda would condemn him for his meddling in matters of faith and successfully point to him as a man guilty of mortal sin.
The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing. And, if he does not succeed in getting himself transferred in the meanwhile to the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, he may rest assured that in the balancing of our accounts, no "T" will remain uncrossed, no "I" undotted !
--July 4, 1942, P. 555
The Church of to-day is nothing more than a hereditary joint stock company for the exploitation of human stupidity.
--August 1, 1942, p. 607
Jesus was most certainly not a Jew. The Jews would never have handed one of their own people to the Roman courts; they would have condemned Him themselves. It is quite probable that a large number of the descendants of the Roman legionaries, mostly Gauls, were living in Galilee, and Jesus was probably one of them. His mother may well have been a Jewess.
Jesus fought against the materialism of His age, and, therefore, against the Jews.
Paul of Tarsus, who was originally one of the most stubborn enemies of the Christians, suddenly realised the immense possibilities of using, intelligently and for other ends, an idea which was exercising such great powers of fascination. He realised that the judicious exploitation of this idea among non-Jews would give him far greater power in the world than would the promise of material profit to the Jews themselves. It was then that the future St. Paul distorted with diabolical cunning the Christian idea. out of this idea, which was a declaration of war on the golden calf, on the egotism and the materialism of the Jews, he created a rallying point for slaves of all kinds against the elite, the masters and those in dominant authority. The religion fabricated by Paul of Tarsus, which was later called Christianity, is nothing but the Communism of to-day.
--Night of November 29-30, 1944, p. 721-722
For those who want the bibliographical referece
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Ed.
Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations
2nd edition.
Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens
London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973.
746p.
DD 247 H675 A3b 1973